There's Sometimes a Buggy

For Part 2 of our Acteur Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh we watched Robert Altman's cinematic embodiment of the Raymond Carver universe, Short Cuts  (1993), and one of Dave's all-time faves, Altman collaborator Alan Rudolph's portrait of Dorothy Parker, her loves, and her milieu,  Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle  (1994). We grapple with exactly why Altman wants us to spend so much time with t...

For this round of Paramount 1935 we watched William A. Wellman's The President Vanishes, based on the pacifist anti-fascist novel by Rex Stout, and the first film version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring George Raft as the devoted and unlucky friend of a criminal political boss. Elise is startled by Raft's liveliness (even as he spends a good stretch of th...

For the first episode of our Acteurist Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh, we watched Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High  (1982) and Paul Verhoeven's  Flesh + Blood  (1985). We explore the possibility of Heckerling's portrait of a young woman's existential journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly of sexual discovery influencing an early draft of the Verhoeven heroine, and the youn...

Our Special Subject for June is Wong Kar-wai's so-called "Love Trilogy": Days of Being Wild  (1990),  In the Mood for Love  (2000), and  2046  (2004). Our discussion walks a tightrope of abstraction as we consider the philosophical implications of Wong's treatment of the theme of love: whether it can be consummated and how time, secrets, androids, and epistemology are involved. Proust, Tarkovsky,...

In this Universal 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss the original There's Always Tomorrow , starring Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes (remade by Douglas Sirk in the 50s with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) and the bizarre Claude Rains vehicle  The Man Who Reclaimed His Head . The middle-class American nuclear families of the 30s and 50s curiously converge, and future Hollywood Ten sc...

For the final episode of our Isabelle Huppert Spotlight, we watched two movies with a colonial setting: Rithy Panh's The Sea Wall  (2008), based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, and Claire Denis'  White Material  (2009). Disturbing eroticism as a lens on colonial class and racial dynamics is something the films share, as well as white colonial failure, while Huppert in  White Material  emerges as...

Our text for this 1934 RKO Studios Year by Year episode is a William A. Seiter double feature distinguished by ultra-manipulative heroines and a simultaneous fascination with and unsubtle criticism of the rich: the comedy We're Rich Again , which earns a comparison to Preston Sturges for its innovative use of comedy tropes (particularly the high-concept heroine, brilliantly embodied by Marian Nixo...

Our Family Freak-Outs series continues to go from strength to strength as we examine Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind  (1956) and Kenneth Lonergan's  Manchester by the Sea  (2016), a couple of masterpieces of American cinema in radically different modes: Technicolor melodrama and micro-realism. We discuss the curious myth of America in  Written on the Wind , as embodied in the Hadley family's to...

For our second Isabelle Huppert Acteurist Spotlight we have another first encounter with an auteur, Claude Chabrol, with the unfortunately translated Story of Women  (1988), and take on Huppert's iconic performance in the also inaccurately translated  The Piano Teacher  (2001). Be prepared for harrowing subject matter and enigmatic behaviour as we discuss the inescapability of moral complicity, se...

For this round of Fox Studios 1934 we watched Change of Heart  (directed by John G. Blystone), Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell's final pairing, co-starring with James Dunn and a brink-of-stardom Ginger Rogers as college friends in unrequited love configurations; and  Marie Galante  (directed by Henry King), from source material by Jacques Duval best known as the basis for Kurt Weill's songs for t...

For our first Isabelle Huppert Acteurist Spotlight episode, we watched Maurice Pialat's  Loulou  (1980), in which Huppert stars with Gérard Depardieu, and Bertrand Tervanier's  Coup de Torchon  (1981), in which she supports Philippe Noiret in a transposition of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French West Africa. We discuss our first impressions of these two late 20th century French auteurs, the cross-...

On this week's Warner Bros. 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at some of the studio's mid-30s B-output: the jazzy, Modernist, montage-ist, telephonic  I've Got Your Number , starring Pat O'Brien as an insouciant and sometimes insolent Everyman (in a comedy team-up we never knew we needed with fuming mentor Eugene Pallette) whose redemption arc is sparked by beleaguered working girl Joan B...

Our Special Subject for this month is The Archers in Black and White: A Canterbury Tale  (1944),  I Know Where I'm Going!  (1945), and  The Small Back Room  (1949). We discuss Powell and Pressburger's interest in the claims and sins of tradition and modernity, their handling of intense romantic relationships, and their search for transcendence in nature and the past. Then, in Fear and Moviegoing i...

We conclude our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight with a couple of her big Hollywood movies after the turning point of From Here to Eternity : Vincente Minnelli's  Tea and Sympathy  (1956), in which she appears as Laura Reynolds, a role she originated on Broadway; and Henry King's  Beloved Infidel  (1959), in which she stars as Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in an autobiographical accoun...

Our MGM 1934 episode this week is a Jean Parker (Beth in RKO's 1933 Little Women ) double feature. She plays the rebellious daughter in the family melodrama  Wicked Woman , which features a fine central performance by noted theatre actress and blacklistee Mady Christians, and a conservationist's daughter who starts an "unlikely animal friends" experiment with a puma cub and a fawn in  Sequoia . Wh...

 For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity . In Norman Taurog's  Please Believe Me  (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, as a respectable British girl who learns how to be American by first b...

With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject,  Family Freak-Outs . We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's  To Sleep with Anger  (1990) and Wes Anderson's  The Royal Tenebaums  (2001). Whil...

For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched  Search for Beauty , which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the crackdown, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes  Crime Without Passion , starring Claude R...

Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's  Love on the Dole  (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's  Perfect Strangers  (aka  Vacation from Marriage ), a sort of comedy of remarriage that envisions a radically new kind of marriage arising ou...

For this Universal 1933 Studios Year by Year episode we commit the sacrilege of trashing a James Whale movie, The Invisible Man , which is also Claude Rains' first major screen role, albeit mainly as a voice. A ranting, irascible voice in a movie with very little evidence (in our irresponsible opinion) of Whale's voice. But then we turn to a movie bearing a strong directorial imprint, William Wyle...

We bid a fond farewell to our Acteurist Spotlight on Delphine Seyrig with the greatest movie of all-time (as of the most recent BFI critics' poll), Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce 1080 Bruxelles  (1975) and its "sequel,"  Golden Eighties  (1986), Akerman's retro-80s-while-it's -still-happening musical. We give our latest thoughts on anxiety, oppression, and orgasms in Jeanne...

Our 2026 Valentine's Day episode explores the romantic appeal of Adam Sandler through his first rom com pairing with Drew Barrymore, The Wedding Singer  (1998), and his celebrated collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson,  Punch-Drunk Love  (2002). While  The Wedding Singer  pursues a sweetness and sincerity alien to the studio-era romantic comedies it in some ways emulates, Anderson's enigmatic fa...

This 1933 RKO Studios Year by Year episode takes us from the sweepings on the floor of a palatial early 20th century department store to celestial shenanigans high above Rio de Janeiro. Lester Cohen's adaptation of his Dreiseresque novel Sweepings  (directed by John Cromwell), another failson saga strongly anticipating HBO's  Succession , struggles to translate generational saga into a coherent 80...

For the second part of our Delphine Seyrig Acteurist Spotlight we disregarded chronology to discuss two intensely experimental Marguerite Duras films, India Song  (1975) and  Baxter, Vera Baxter  (1977). We enumerate Duras' peculiarities as a writer and filmmaker and their effects in these studies of sexual and existential crisis, set against the backdrop of European colonialism and the second-wav...

In this episode we revisit three Technicolor melodramas made by British cinema's great auteur duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, bursting with vibrant emotions and sensuality that exercise a dangerous allure over their protagonists: Clive Candy, the upper-class colonialist twerp played by Roger Livesey in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp  (1943) who discovers the poetry in his soul than...